The name John Barry speaks for itself. His film-music career spans more than four decades, during which time he has composed some of the most amazing and well-known film scores in cinema history, including his immensely popular music that defined the character of the celluloid James Bond. Barry’s keen insight into the emotional heart of film stories has made his music – which skillfully runs the gamut from jazzy to deeply dramatic – a major influence on many film composers and makes him practically a household name to the filmgoing public. I am ever grateful for the time that he shared with me, allowing me a glimpse into his unique musical world. When did you actually know you were to become a composer? I think when I was about nine. I took piano lessons at school with this large lady who used to smoke all the time. She had this huge blonde hair but the actual front of her hair was kind of brown. If you played the wrong note, she’d hit your knuckles with a ruler. I always thought this was strange behavior for a piano teacher, but that was her style. Nevertheless, it was about that time that music became a strong interest to me. When you first look at a project, what is your approach to scoring that picture? I always look at it as if I’m a member of the audience. I never look at it from a professional point of view. I act as though I am sitting myself down and I’ve paid my bucks, so entertain me. I find that very useful. If I get engrossed in its story, its performances, or whatever, and then it holds me, I want to do it. How did you usually communicate with a director prior to the days of temp scores? The big thing I used to do upon meeting a director was surreptitiously find out how much he actually knew about music. What is his musical knowledge? And then I’d adjust myself according to my assessment of that. I didn’t do it in an arrogant, brash way, but in a helpful way. I found that worked. So you either listen to the guy or take the reins. Richard Lester, for instance, knew a lot about music. The Bond directors, none of them knew music about music at all. I didn’t mind that. Did you just basically come to the table with your ideas and play demos? After a very short time in the business, I thought that the more the director knows about what the music is, the better it is going to be for everyone. So I used to ask for a pre-recording budget so I could go in and record maybe three or four things, not the whole score, because I base most of my scores on themes, and some of them are very broad, wide-open kinds of things. There are a million ways to arrive at a point of view, and I always try to get a point of view. If I didn’t get it, I felt there was something missing for me. You’ve worked with so many filmmakers through the years. Has the younger generation posed any conflicts or challenges to your scoring process? I found the directors of the past that I’ve had the pleasure of working with had more knowledge of music. They couldn’t detail music in musical terms, but they had very exacting ways of explaining what needed to be done with a theme. I much prefer if a director can give me some strong indications as to what he wants the audiences to react to in a scene. There are things in certain scenes where the dialogue is saying something that we know is a devious behavior. They’re going to be betrayed later on in the movie. Those kinds of things are wonderful for the composer to have and to play with. I had the good fortune to have been born into a movie environment, so a lot of these things came automatically to me. But I’ve found that a lot of people who decide when they’re in their twenties that they want to be filmmakers lack a lot of warmth. A lot of passion about movies isn’t there. To a lot of people, but not everyone, it’s just a job. What composers have contributed to your rich sound? I’m a huge fan of Russian composers. And, strangely enough, many of the successful ones, like Prokofiev and Shostakovich, did Russian movie scores – and wonderful scores, too. Those are the people I really loved and worshipped one way or the other, and not only what they wrote for film, but also all their symphonies. How much of your own experiences inspire your themes, and how much is taken strictly from the content of the film? We don’t necessarily have the exact situation, obviously, that’s going on on the screen, but we’ve had similar experiences. When I see a movie for the first time, sometimes I call on my own experiences, which are not exactly the same, but similar in many ways, and I very much draw on that well of emotions. The Bond films have a unique voice. How did your Bond sound come to be? You must know that I’m a very big jazz fan. And I had an older brother, Patrick, who was a really big jazz fan. I’ve loved contemporary jazz, and that played a major role in those movies. “GoldenEye” was composed by Eric Serra. Why did you not continue with the Bond films? I think I had done enough. One thing was great about it, and one thing wasn’t so great about it: After virtually scoring the same movie ten times, which was basically what it was – always the hero, the woman, the villain – I just felt exhausted, like I had run the course. So I backed out. Your shoes are nearly impossible to fit into. Did David Arnold ever seek your input for his first James Bond score, “The World Is Not Enough”, for a smooth transition? Yes. David was very sweet, and he called me. I said, “Look, if you want to me with me, I’ll tell you as much as I can. I can’t tell you note for note, but I can tell you what my attitude was.” We spent some time together, and I explained how I went about it. I think he was very grateful. I’m not a teacher. I can’t go into the details. I just told him what to look for – what I always looked for – and gave him whatever advice I could that I thought would be useful. I was intrigued by “Jagged Edge’s” early synthesizer sounds. At the time I saw it, I only knew the orchestral John Barry, so I’m curious: How challenging was this project? I wanted to use the synthesizer. Everyone was starting to use it. It had a certain flexibility where you could just put things a little off, and that made it kind of interesting. You could bend chords, you could do weird stuff with them. And it seemed appropriate in that movie. Everybody uses synths now. They don’t use them in a very imaginative way. It’s like a wall of sounds and everything blends. The thing about an orchestra is that you have this wonderful separation of the orchestra fabric: You can choose to do the themes on the strings, on the woodwinds, the solo trumpet, or whatever. But you don’t have that wonderful orchestra fabric with the synthesizer – it all blends into one movie sound. I’m not crazy about it as a primary instrument. You seem to have a great fluency with jazz music, as found in your scores for “Hammer” and “Body Heat” and “The Cotton Club”. Do you enjoy writing in a jazz style? Oh, absolutely. I hate the jazz thing when it’s inappropriate, but when it’s appropriate, it’s a wonderful thing. I don’t think I write in a jazzy way. My approach is more orchestral, so it comes down to a matter of the musicians you get – whether it’s an alto sax player who I know is going to be great, or a trumpet player like Chris Botti. “Body Heat” was all built around the alto sax, and it had a lovely, personalized quality throughout, which I liked very much. I remember alto sax player Ronnie Lang would play these great solos that were fascinating. Do you find your musical inspiration in a film’s characters or its settings? It’s very much the characters. It’s their reactions and their behavior to the situations that I go with. And that’s very much an emotional thing – love, hate, and so on. It’s the ambiguity of human behavior that you go with. That’s what makes things so personal. Even though I’m writing this thing, I’m writing the reactions of the characters to the situation they’re in. In “Dances with Wolves”, your music is picturesque, but it also incorporates the character’s reactions to his surroundings. Right. It was very much about how Kevin Costner’s character observed things. He wanted to see the West before it was gone. I was struck by a line in the script about how he was going to see something that was passing from the sights of the Earth – it was never going to be the same again. I virtually based the whole score on that. It was the key to the whole score. “The Deep” has a unique musical flavor. It was an unusual flute sound set amid intimate orchestral themes. Why did you choose that sound, and does the use of the flute have any particular significance? Well, it was just that thing about being underwater. I’ve dived; I live in Oyster Bay right on the water here. Floating around is almost like flying, but you’re in water. It’s the freest way we’re able to movie, unless you want to jump out of a plane without a parachute. When you dive underwater, the world becomes the mumbles, and it shuts out light and movement. I just tried to capture that kind of thing with a lot of reverberation. Two of your scores – “My Life” and “Chaplin” – fill me with warmth and tragedy in the same breath. Would you talk about your music for “My Life”, and what fed your heartbreaking themes for it? I’m always attracted to that sense of sadness. It’s just something that’s always been there. It’s just a natural thing. I don’t force it. Michael Keaton was wonderful in that movie and the music was about the oncoming sense of loss – that you’re not going to be there anymore. You really can’t talk for hours about it. It’s a very felt thing. I think the composer must have the ability to see a character and really get him, really understand and comprehend what it is that he must be going through. That’s why I love music. I don’t sit down and write a thesis on what’s going on in this guy’s mind. I sit down and write music, and it’s far clearer for me to do that. I am moved by it, and that’s what I work with. Your “Chaplin” score opens with a sorrowful theme that sums up Charlie Chaplin’s life. The music tells the real story. How much research went into finding the right music for this film? I had seen all of the Chaplin films – from “The Gold Rush” onwards – in my dad’s theater. I just loved them and grew up with an appreciation of Chaplin right from the beginning. So, there wasn’t research, but rather, I had an awareness from the start. Chaplin had this wonderful directness and wonderful simplicity in the way he acted and in the way he directed. He never did anything that was complicated when you analyze it. I think the sadness of Chaplin was when he found his voice. I think he was wonderful when he was totally silent and just dealt with the visuals. Chaplin and W.C. Fields took the art of comedy to new heights. They are my comedic gods. Of course, Fields was very different. He was very verbal and very interesting. I don’t know whether you know this, but women don’t like W.C. Fields. He said things like, “Women are like elephants; I like to look at them, but I don’t want to own one.” I remember when he was in The Plaza and The New York Times interviewed him as he sat in the bay window there drinking his champagne. The interviewer asked him, “You have all this success now and all these movies. I wonder, do you ever think back about those times and the people you worked with in those movies?” He replied, “You know, Id o. I think ‘Fuck ‘em’.” It was so W.C. Fields, so in character. What do you look for when you choose a project to work on? I read about some artist, I can’t remember who it was, who years ago talked about having a nervous reaction towards a visual phenomena. I thought, “Oh my God, that’s exactly what I feel when I see a movie!” It’s something that makes me nervous, which is not necessarily a bad thing. It’s something that pricks you, makes you sit up. If I get worried or disturbed or moved or happy or whatever by what’s going on, then I know that I’ve got something to write about. But if I sit down with a movie for twenty minutes and nothing is happening, and I get distinct feeling that it’s going to go on like this, I say, “Excuse me, gentlemen, I don’t think I am the right composer for your movie.” Sitting through something that you know isn’t good is the worst thing. There are two CDs of your music from outside of the film world that I find unbelievably captivating – “The Beyondness of Things” and “Eternal Echoes”. Both have that sentimental sound and lush orchestration that is uniquely yours. What inspired these works? I just love the title “The Beyondness of Things”. I don’t know whether I read it somewhere or whether I came up with it. But I love that and “Eternal Echoes”. Father John O’Donohue, an Irish priest whom I know rather well, wrote this wonderful book called Eternal Echoes. I phoned him to see if he would mind me using the title. In a strange way, if I don’t have the film, I make up my own scenes, as it were, to whatever I’m going to write. I take the words that I like for the songs and what is “the script” behind those words – the meaning and emotion behind those words. I can’t just sit down and write music. I’ve tried, but I just find it very difficult. I want to write about something. What does it mean to you to have impacted so many lives with film music that is adored around the world? I’m very flattered. It’s kind of a silent confirmation, if you’d like, that you’ve reached an audience with what you’ve felt and your assessment of what the story was about – that you put your finger on the nerve sensor. That’s the way I communicate. I just don’t write a lovely melody or something like that. There’s a lot of storytelling behind each melody. I can see somebody walking down a street, a character for instance, and I look and find there’s a lot there in that person. It’s in the way they walk and the way they smile – something springs out of that. My music has everything to do with people. I don’t write for castles, I write for people in castles. Why are they there and what are they doing?